Signing PDF documents will be so easy soon

You Can Now Sign PDFs Using Lion’s Preview App [Screenshots, How-To]
[Via Cult of Mac]

There’s plenty of software programs on the Mac App Store that will allow you to add a signature to a PDF, but come Lion, you won’t need any of them: Preview.app will do it by creating a perfect digital pen signature via FaceTime.

Here’s how to sign a PDF in Preview under OS X Lion.

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What I do now is scan a signature. Open up the file in Photoshop along with the signature page of the PDF. Copy the signature over to the signature page and format. Save the page as a PDF. Open Preview with the PDF containing the unsigned signature page along with the new PDF of the signed page. Move the signed page over to the other document and replace the unsigned page by deleting it. Now I can save the document that has the signature.

With Lion, I can do it all in one app. Sweet.

A court case to watch

Key court case tests right to record the police with a cell phone
[Via Ars Technica]

If you pull out your cell phone to make a video of police officers arresting a suspect, are you “secretly recording” them? “No” seems like the obvious answer, but that’s precisely the claim that three police officers made to justify their arrest of a Boston man. In arguments before the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit on Wednesday, the city also denied the man’s claim that his First or Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.

The case will be an important test of whether the Constitution protects individuals’ right to record the police while they are on duty.

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If it is illegal to record the police in Boston as they act in public, then it is also illegal for a tourist to record a public street. But that makes no sense at all.

This need for both sides to be specifically told they are being recorded just does not make sense in today’s world. Especially since it is only audio recording that is a problem. If you recorded the video with n sound, it would have been okay.

And what are they going to do with cameras that stream to the internet immediately as they film> The inability of them to adjust to new technology in a reasonable sense is part of the officer’s problem.

The cops are worried about how their work may be portrayed but arresting innocent people and threatening their livelihoods does not seem like a way to insure safety.